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Games People Play QUOTES

Games People Play QUOTES

1 " Awareness requires living in the here and now, and not in the elsewhere, the past or the future. "

― Eric Berne , Games People Play

2 " Parents, deliberately or unaware, teach their children from birth how to behave, drink, feel and perceive. Liberation from these influences is no easy matter. "

― Eric Berne , Games People Play

3 " Solitary confinement is one of the punishments most dreaded even by prisoners hardened to physical brutality, and is now a notorious procedure for inducing political compliance. (Conversely, the best of the known weapons against compliance is social organization.) "

― Eric Berne , Games People Play

4 " A variant of "Psychiatry" is "Archaeology" (title by courtesy of Dr. Norman Reider of San Francisco), in which the patient takes the position that if she can only find out who had the button, so to speak, everything will suddenly be all right. This results in a continual rumination over childhood happenings. "

― Eric Berne , Games People Play

5 " Father has good reasons on his side, since few people can afford to go through life listening to the birds sing, and the sooner the little boy starts his “education” the better. "

― Eric Berne , Games People Play

6 " At the end of the party, each person will have selected certain players he would like to see more of, while others he will discard, regardless of how skillfully or pleasantly they each engaged in the pastime. The ones he selects are those who seem the most likely candidates for more complex relationships—that is, games. This sorting system, however well rationalized, is actually largely unconscious and intuitive. "

― Eric Berne , Games People Play

7 " It can be shown experimentally that eidetic perception evokes affection, and that candidness mobilizes positive feelings, so that there is even such a thing as "one-sided intimacy" - a phenomenon well known, although not by that name, to professional seducers, who are able to capture their partners without becoming involved themselves. This they do by encouraging the other person to look at them directly and to talk freely, while the male or female seducer makes only a well-guarded pretense of reciprocating. "

― Eric Berne , Games People Play

8 " The eternal problem of the human being is how to structure his waking hours "

― Eric Berne , Games People Play

9 " Beautiful friendships” are often based on the fact that the players complement each other with great economy and satisfaction, so that there is a maximum yield with a minimum effort from the games they play with each other. "

― Eric Berne , Games People Play

10 " Pastimes and games are substitutes for the real living of real intimacy. "

― Eric Berne , Games People Play

11 " Such a woman is called "Mother's FRIEND" always ready to give judicious Parental advice and living vicariously on the experience of others "

― Eric Berne , Games People Play

12 " The solitary individual can structure time in two ways: activity and fantasy. "

― Eric Berne , Games People Play

13 " Everyone carries his parents around inside of him. "

― Eric Berne , Games People Play

14 " For certain fortunate people there is something which transcends all classifications of behaviour, and that is awareness; something which rises above the programming of the past, and that is spontaneity; and something that is more rewarding than games, and that is intimacy. "

― Eric Berne , Games People Play

15 " Society frowns upon candidness, except in privacy; good sense knows that it can always be abused; and the Child fears it because of the unmasking which it involves. Hence in order to get away from the ennui of pastimes without exposing themselves to the dangers of intimacy, most people compromise for games when they are available, and these fill the major part of the more interesting hours of social intercourse. That is the social significance of games. "

― Eric Berne , Games People Play

16 " we shared a common interest in how the past effects people—some let it decide who they are, while others make it part of what they will do. "

― Eric Berne , Games People Play

17 " In short, a diamond bracelet is a much more honest instrument of courtship than a perforated stomach. She has the option of throwing the jewelry back at him, but she cannot decently walk out on the ulcer. ("Look How Hard I've Been Trying") "

― Eric Berne , Games People Play

18 " Salesman: ‘This one is better, but you can’t afford it.’ Housewife: ‘That’s the one I’ll take. "

― Eric Berne , Games People Play

19 " The position is, then, that at any given moment each individual in a social aggregation will exhibit a Parental, Adult or Child ego state, and that individuals can shift with varying degrees of readiness from one ego state to another. "

― Eric Berne , Games People Play

20 " It is not difficult to deduce from an individual’s position the kind of childhood he must have had. Unless something or somebody intervenes, he spends the rest of his life stabilizing his position and dealing with situations that threaten it: by avoiding them, warding off certain elements or manipulating them provocatively so that they are transformed from threats into justifications. "

― Eric Berne , Games People Play